Forgot Moses Lake, Boot but you make a sound point. Schools are gun-free zones with a large population of defenseless potential victims and pose little or no initial risk to the perpetrator. If our entire populace exercised the degree of situational awareness that folks in countries such as Israel do, that would help.

It’s interesting that the first newscasts focused on exactly which guns were used, but of course we ARE in the age of liberal media with an agenda.

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Although I don't necessarily disagree with everything you've written here, this sort of statement seems to me to be "conservative cant". From my perspective the media is anything but liberal. AM radio is chock full of seemingly rabid conservative talk shows with little or no regard for facts. Newspapers are still, for the most part, run by large - and conservative - media empires and then, of course, there's Fox "News". But I guess those guys have no "agenda".

I own guns, was once trained extensively to use guns, carried afterwards for 20 years because I felt that the training at tax-payer's expense meant that I had an obligation to act if the circumstances warrant. They never did and in my 60s I decided not to renew my permit.

Professionally I feel that "fat grip" handguns are counterproductive and lead to "spraying" (as an incident in Florida years ago concluded). Personally, I don't think I need an assault weapon but that if you want one there should be an avenue for you to get one that conforms to the 2nd amendment and still protects the rest of us.

Like most people I lean towards the left for some things and towards the right for others.

But I try to realize when I've been hoodwinked into thinking one side or the other is always right.

Well, of course, school is the single common denominator for everyone isn't it? We all went to school at one time or another. And since so many of these shooters are under 30 (or even still attending school) it's hardly surprising that they choose the environment they know so well. They understand schools, after all.

What struck me as odd about this latest situation is that the shooter chose an elementary school. But because the facts of this incident are so muddled right now it's hard to determine if he even went to this school; but if he did, it had to have been a decade or more ago. Half of his life ago. So why did he choose not only this particular school but one particular class in this particular school? Or was it simply chance? The first public building he came across that he thought he could invade?

This, to my mind, underscores the difficulty of even analyzing these incidents. Sure, we can outline where everyone was at every moment, but the "why" will forever elude us. It's because, I think, of the very irrationality of the incidents that makes them unfathomable. Even if we are irrational ourselves, we can't be irrational in exactly the same way as the perpetrators and so we cannot really know what they were thinking.

Except that, in almost every case, I think they thought that somehow they were the heroes not the villains. They thought that they'd change things.

If we can ever understand that particular twisted sense of reality we might be able to predict who will do something like this in the future.

You've done a masterful job of analyzing, statistically, the incidents. We can reliably predict at least one in 2013 and probably two; we cannot predict where, when or who.

We can turn our schools into fortresses (as some here have suggested) but a determined person with enough resources will still gain entry somehow no matter what we do.

Maybe the idea of requiring a certain number of teachers to carry concealed weapons, training them to know how and when to use them, and then REQUIRING them to carry them might help these specific incidents. I've always thought that anyone with a concealed-carry-permit should HAVE to carry by virtue of the permit, anyway.

Knowing that someone might shoot me before I completed any "mission" would certainly deter me. But then I'm rational.

Actually, just try to buy enough nitrate to fill up a truck and you might find yourself surprised by the result.

Craig

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As former military who has had explosives training I know the components. My neighbor who is a farmer has over 2 tons of nitrate fertilizer and I am very familiar with the law. Would be very easy to fill up a truck and go down and purchase 20 gal of diesel to produce anfo. And on an off side after reading your sig line I live on solar power and know first hand the requirements of solar power.

Try living on solar power here in Washington from November to May. I spent an hour this morning cleaning 2 ft of snow from mynpanels . Now running a propane generator for power. Not so great is it?

As former military who has had explosives training I know the components. My neighbor who is a farmer has over 2 tons of nitrate fertilizer and I am very familiar with the law. Would be very easy to fill up a truck and go down and purchase 20 gal of diesel to produce anfo. And on an off side after reading your sig line I live on solar power and know first hand the requirements of solar power.

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Yes, you can steal it. But the original point of this was that "you can still buy fertilizer" which, at least in the quantities required to produce a truck bomb, is not so true for the average person. Even you. And I'd bet your neighbor might object to you stealing his 2 tons of fertilizer; he might actually call the cops while you were doing it.

Try living on solar power here in Washington from November to May. I spent an hour this morning cleaning 2 ft of snow from mynpanels . Now running a propane generator for power. Not so great is it?

I invite you to try it

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So you're saying that solar panels don't work 100% of the time? There's a shock. We might just as well give up the whole idea then.

Probably. I have two panels on my roof, but they do fuck all to power these lights.

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Maybe a moderator can move these to a new thread.

So we're not talking about those little "garden walkway" lights that you can buy at Lowe's for $29 with a "solar charger", huh? Dark days can be a bitch, no doubt about it. I assume they're charging a battery bank? Try switching to MPPT controllers, check wire sizes, add or replace batteries, add a panel. But in this state we'll need to pull power from the grid - or a generator - for at least 4 months of the year.

The whole point of "distributed" solar power is not to power your house all the time but to augment the existing power generation structure. If we can get enough people doing the augmenting that, combined with the ability of the power grid to "wheel" power to other locations, can reduce or maybe eliminate the need for new plants. Meaning no new nukes or coal or even natural gas.

The bonus is that the grid does not have to be changed; if you can pull 10kw out of the grid you can push 10kw back into it. Where it goes from there is not your concern.